Erasmus D. Keyes

Erasmus Darwin Keyes (29 May 1810-14 October 1895) was a Major-General of the US Army during the American Civil War, commanding the Union IV Corps in the Army of the Potomac.

Biography
Erasmus Darwin Keyes was born in Brinfield, Massachusetts in 1810, and his family moved to Kennebec County, Maine while he was young. He graduated from West Point in 1832, tenth in a class of 45 students, and he served as an artillery and cavalry instructor at West Point and an aide to Winfield Scott during the 1830s and 1840s. Keyes was sent to the American West and fought against Native Americans in Washington's Puget Sound from 1855 to 1856, serving on garrison duty. In 1861, at the start of the American Civil War, he was promoted to colonel in the US Army, and he became a Brigadier-General of volunteers in May 1861. He commanded the IV Corps of the Army of the Potomac during the Peninsula Campaign, and he was promoted to Brigadier-General after the Battle of Fair Oaks in 1862. John Adams Dix had Keyes removed from command in 1863 due to Keyes' opposition to a feint against Richmond to distract Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia from the campaign leading up to the Battle of Gettysburg. On 6 May 1864, left without a command, he resigned from the army, moving to San Francisco, California to become president of a gold mining company and converting to Catholicism. While on a trip to Nice, France in 1895, he died at the age of 85.